John Huston started in Hollywood as a screenwriter, working throughout the 1930s for such directors as William Wyler, Robert Florey, Anatole Litvak, William Dieterle, and Raoul Walsh until he got the chance to direct his own script for The Maltese Falcon (1941). In a directorial career that went on to span five decades and thirty–seven feature films, Huston made a specialty of literary adaptation, basing all but ten of his films on the work of authors as diverse as Herman Melville, Flannery O'Connor, Rudyard Kipling, Tennessee Williams, Dashiell Hammett, and B. Traven. Ever ready to take on new challenges, he turned to perhaps the most difficult author of all, James Joyce, for what proved to be his last film, The Dead. Both the story and the film are set in Dublin and recount the events of a single night in January of 1904, in which an annual post–holiday party, filled with friends, good cheer, and hospitality, is followed by a wife's private and devastating confession to her husband of a long-ago love affair with a young man now dead. Huston, himself near death, drew upon deep wells of emotional and physical strength to see The Dead through to its completion, creating in the process a serenely beautiful work that acknowledges the all-too-human frailties of its characters without in any way absolving them of their responsibilities toward each other, or the past.